Excerpt from Annual Report of Program Activities, Vol. 1: U. S. National Heart and Lung Institute

The single most significant event of the year for the NIMH Intramural Research Program is the announced return of the NIHM to the NIH as a part of a larger reorganization of HSMHA. I will say more about this later on. As one looks back on fiscal year 1973, it is necessary to note that the political or administrative context in which the year's research program has taken place is one of many months of reorganization in DHEW and in the rest of the Federal Government, much shifting of Cabinet officers and other officials as a consequence of the re-election of President Nixon, many periods of confusion from such shiftings, and much muddling through of periods when, as one senior official remarked to me, "There is now no effective governance in the Department." I am glad to say that throughout the year there was always effective governance in the NIMH. I hope there has been in the Intramural Program too, though the budgetary, personnel, travel, and other constraints under which we have operated (not much different from last year) have frequently made it difficult to conclude agreements and maintain commitments. They also made it difficult to provide the support needed for a good deal of important research.

These notes are the second draft I have written for this annual report. The first, since discarded, dealt with the role of science in the Federal Government since the 1972 election, an unhappy account. One lives in this context of politics, good, bad, or indifferent, but in truth, the political events of the past 7 months have had little immediate and specific effect on this program, hence the discard. The potential long-range effects of these events are the source of my concern, and I hope that trends visible near the end of this year of the Watergate will make for happier reflections a year from now.

As this program has grown older the number of problems related to inflexibility of committed budgetary support has increased, and Dr. Robert A. Cohen's annual report as Director of the Division of Clinical and Behavioral Research is an important review of some of them. I commend it to all staff of the Intramural Program. Some of the issues he discusses will be on the agenda for discussion by Laboratory and Branch Chiefs at the "retreat" on June 12 - 13, 1973, at Cacapon Lodge, Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. This two-day meeting will be the second meeting of its kind. The first, a one-day affair in a Building 31 conference room on April 30, 1970, was a useful beginning but was too short to deal with certain major problems. It should not have taken us three years to organize a successor.

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